


No Promises

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [278]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Escorts, An Woman Who Knows What She Wants, Escort Steve Rogers, F/M, In Which We Pretend 1970s SHIELD Headquarters Is In DC, One Night Stands, Silver Fox Peggy Carter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 16:57:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19407487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Prompt:This.





	No Promises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [places](https://archiveofourown.org/users/places/gifts).



> Prompt: [This](https://twitter.com/wjsqkdtk/status/641236821427421184).

The first time, she'd done it on a whim. A very carefully considered whim, that is. Even in this, her fiftieth year, she can count on one hand the decisions she’s made out of some mad sense of spontaneity, some temporary desire to be someone who she’s not, and none of those turned out well for her or for any other parties involved, as Daniel--dear, sweet, desperate to be loved Daniel--would be the first to attest.

She’d been young enough to think that staying married to him was a kindness, that spending five years with his ring on her finger was the better thing than bolting as soon as she’d awakened from the willful delusion borne by a cream-colored dress, the book at the registry office, and a tiered vanilla cake. It hadn’t been, of course; quite the opposite. He would have been devastated, yes, but he wouldn’t hate her as he still did now, twenty years later, for having the audacity to put on face for him and stay and stay and stay.

She’d been young, that was the problem. But she wasn’t young anymore.

For Margaret Carter, though, age has been a gift, a sort of clarifying solution to the muddy problem that was life. She knows what she wants from the world in a way she couldn’t have before the war, before Daniel, before divorce, before spending years getting sneered at by men who were her intellectual and physical inferior and learning how to best them all, in the end. She’s the head of their sons now, the offspring of the men who sneered at her and gave her the eye, oversees a few of their daughters, too. That’s her mission, the one that drives her: diversifying the ranks of SHIELD, making sure the agents in the field are representative of the world that is rather than the world the old, white men dream exists. It’s a fight and a damned good one. She’s proud to make the drive to work every day, to step into her office and know that what she does behind that desk will change what happens tomorrow and she’s grateful for that chance--for her younger self seizing opportunity, stealing it when she had to--every moment of every day.

But.

What she also knows better now than she did when she was young, when she carried a gun, is what she needs in matters of love. And what she needs is this:

A man to tend to her needs a few times a month. A man with whom she has no attachment, with whom she will never form ties. They tend to be younger than she is, the men who please her best, men with smooth skin and big hands and mouths that bend to her will when she asks because that is what she is paying them for, their attentions, and no one knows better than she where those attentions are spent best.

She favors hotels for her assignations, big ones outside of the Beltway. Philadelphia sometimes, or Trenton. A few times as far south as Richmond, as far west as Pittsburgh. A day’s drive and back from DC, no more.

She tells her security detail that she’s meeting sources, old friends from behind the Iron Curtain she cultivated before the wall rose, and usually, playing the _I was a spy before you were born_ card with her security detail gets her what she wants. Sometimes she has to raise her voice, or worse, lower it; once, an overzealous chief who thought he knew better had taken the matter to Howard Stark, who had--so he reported to Margaret--taken one look at the fool and just laughed.

“I told him,” Stark had said over supper, his eyes glinting with gin, “that he’d better trot downstairs and turn in his badge and his gun now because there was no way in the seven layers of Hell that you’d ever take his ass back.”

The message had been received quite clearly. Now, when she calls for a car with no driver of an evening, her team knows well enough to stand back.

She’s waiting for him now, the man for tonight, watching the ice run around in her glass. Two fingers of scotch have melted to one and there’s a warm spread in her bones like brown sugar; her spine feels like caramel. Her mind is still her own but it’s muffled pleasantly, as if she’s shut the worse of her thoughts away in a room with thick doors. She’s wearing the same wrap dress she put on this morning when she readied for work, the same pumps, but her stockings she’s deigned to lose.

There would be too--were she not drinking--a shade of question about the evening. This man will be a new one. She’ll be damned, though, if she can remember his name; not that it matters. Still, she likes to know all the same.

A rap at the door brings her up straight. She stands and sets her glass on the window sill. Crosses straight to the door.

“Yes?”

“Miss Romanov?” Her favorite pseudonym.

She squints through the peephole, gets a blurred shot of blonde hair and blue eyes. “Yes, my dear,” she says, as if they’re old friends. She feels soft beneath her skirt, a sudden, hard flush. “I’m here.”

The man who steps through the door is taller than she is, much. A rare enough thing. But he’s also the sort of handsome that people gape at in the street--a face, she thinks with a smile as she locks the door, bolts it--who’d give Redford a race for his name.

“Hello,” he says when she’s standing before him, rain clinging to the wool of his greatcoat. “I’m Steven. Steve, I mean. I don’t”---to her great surprise, he blushes, a curl of pink that takes up the tip of his ears--“I know the agency prefers it more formal, but I’d rather you call me Steve.”

“Steve.” She says his name slowly, letting the scotch lead the way. “That’s a lovely name.”

His face lights up; she can see some of his nervousness ease. “And what would you like me to call you, ma’am?”

They call her Peggy. All her men call her Peggy. A childhood name, not the one on her business cards, on her nameplate, in the _Post_ on those rare occasions when she allows herself to be quoted.

But something about this man, Steve, feels different. They haven’t even touched each other yet, and already, the whole evening does. This then should be different, too.

“Just that,” she tells him. “ _Ma’am_ will do nicely.”

His mouth curves and something in his face softens. It makes him look impossibly young. But he’s not a child, this one; there’s too much in the world in him. He’s seen difficult things, she thinks to herself, and done them. Vietnam, maybe? A one-year tour and then straight back? It’s hard to tell. It doesn’t matter. But she wonders, if she looks, when she does, if she’ll see scars on his knuckles, on his ribs, on his back.

“Then ma’am it is,” he says. “Would you mind, ma’am, if I took off my coat?”

She tips her chin at the wardrobe. “Please do.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t break his gaze, and oh, god, that look alone makes her cunt clench. What he says only makes matters that much better. “And then once I do, I hope you’ll ask me to kiss you. Because I’d like to, ma’am. Very much.”

“We’ll see about that,” she says, stepping back so he can pass, so she can keep control of herself and not touch. “No promises.”

He grins as he reaches for his lapels and peels back his coat, reveals a body molded into an old-fashioned wide lapeled suit that lifts her breath away. “None needed, ma’am. Not tonight.”


End file.
